Monday, September 21, 2009

Look out for gorgeous young Brit Georgia King in stunning new coming-of-age film Tanner Hall which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.

Georgia’s route into acting was, by some measures, unorthodox. Although performance is in her blood (her father Jonathan Hyde is an actor, her mother Isobel Buchanan an opera singer and her sister, another actor, is RADA trained), she did not go to stage school, and her first role, at age nineteen, coincided with the change of direction many people undertake around that age. Some go to uni; Georgia went for a four-part BBC serial. And so while her old schoolmates were coming down with freshers’ flu, or having trippy gap-year experiences on a beach in Laos (I’m guessing), Georgia was playing the coquettish Rosamond Oliver in the 2006 version of Jane Eyre. She took to it like a fish to water — so well, indeed, that you have a sneaky suspicion Georgia always knew that she could swim. She went on to play head girl Harriet in the teen flick Wild Child, and then Sophie in teen horror Tormented, as well as a number of varied TV roles.

Tanner Hall is a vivid peek into the private world of an all-girls boarding school.In a cosy, but run down New England town, the knot of adolescent complexity is unravelled through the coming of age stories of four teenage girls.

Teens Fern (Rooney Mara), Kate (Brie Larson), and Lucasta (Amy Fergusen) aren't sisters, but they are best friends who live together year round--and that's a very complicated twist on the same thing. And newcomer Victoria (Georgia King) enrolls and adds her own drama to a perilously angsty situation.